The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand. - Jonah Lehrer

"Emerson looked like a Puritan minister, with abrupt cheekbones and a long, bony nose. A man of solitude, he was prone to bouts of selfless self-absorption. "I like the silent church before the service begins," he confessed in "Self-Reliance." He wrote in his journal that he liked man, but not men. When he wanted to think, he would take long walks by himself in the woods."

As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.